Hybrid system and method for secure collaboration using homomorphic encryption and trusted hardware

Abstract

A device, system and method for secure collaborations on encrypted data in a hybrid environment of a homomorphic encryption (HE) enabled device and trusted hardware. A set of computations may be divided into a subset of linear computations and a subset of non-linear computations. The linear computations on the encrypted data may be executed using homomorphic encryption (HE) in the homomorphic encryption (HE) enabled device. The non-linear computations on the unencrypted data may be executed in the trusted hardware in an unencrypted domain and encrypting the result. The results of the linear and non-linear computations may be decrypted and merged to generate a result equivalent to executing the set of linear and non-linear computations on the unencrypted data.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 62 / 702,669, filed Jul. 24, 2018, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]Embodiments of the invention are directed to data privacy, security, and encryption of secret data. In particular, embodiments of the invention are directed to secure multi-party collaborations, in which one or more parties encrypt their secret data to safely share with one or more external or third parties, which can then remotely operate on the data, without exposing the underlining secret data to an untrusted party.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]Today, massive amounts of data live in many organizations, with barriers between them, erected by mistrust, economic incentives and regulatory hurdles. When secret data, such as, personal or medical data is involved, privacy becomes a major concern for all parties involved, as that information...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The invention provides a hybrid environment combining homomorphic encryption and trusted hardware for secure collaborations on encrypted data. The invention optimizes speed and security by dividing linear and non-linear computations into separate encrypted and unencrypted domains, where linear computations are performed faster using homomorphic encryption and non-linear computations are performed faster in the unencrypted domain. The results are then decrypted and merged to produce the same results as performing the original combined linear and non-linear computations. The "technical effect" of the invention is to increase the speed or runtime of the processor(s) executing the computations to approximately linearly proportional to the number of multiplications performed.

Problems solved by technology

Today, massive amounts of data live in many organizations, with barriers between them, erected by mistrust, economic incentives and regulatory hurdles.

Because encryption obscures and permutes the content and order of the data, computations conventionally are not performed on the encrypted data.

Trusted hardware is often implemented as a “secure chip” and generally has limited memory and computational capacity, rendering it slow and having insufficient storage when large amounts of data and complex computations are involved.

Although HE can theoretically work on any data, HE is extremely slow because the source data is encrypted in a representation significantly larger than the source data, so many more operations need to be performed to support computations on encrypted data than the source data.

In practice, HE is unrealistic to use in most real-world settings, especially when large amounts of data and complex computations are involved.

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